DevOps + FinOps: Practices for Hyperscale Developer Efficiency
Enterprise organizations like National Australia Bank are migrating wholesale to the Cloud, and also adopting DevOps and FinOps practices to achieve a heightened level of both developer AND cost efficiency.
National Australia Bank (NAB) are the largest business bank in Australia, with over 30,000 employees and 9 million customers across 900 locations globally.
NAB began their cloud journey because they knew it’s what their customers needed. Since then they’ve migrated over 65% of their applications to the cloud, enhancing their digital capability and providing a better experience for their customers.
NAB have also invested heavily in up-skilling their employees, training 7,000 NAB employees on cloud services with 2,700 of these now formally accredited, via their ‘Cloud Guild‘.
This skills program has been central to their digital transformation journey, that began in 2018, enabled via a long-term deal with AWS and headlined by a goal of transforming the customer experience with AI and ML.
Hyperscale Developer Efficiency
As CTO Steve Day states migration to the Cloud is just the start of their journey, and what is particularly notable about their evolution is the incorporation of ‘FinOps’ into their activities.
The AWS case study provides a detailed review of their technical migration work, and highlights that:
“The bank achieved this by setting up a cloud cost optimization practice to match capacity to demand. With the adoption of infrastructure as code and by configuring in-house control of its infrastructure, NAB improved its flexibility and efficiency and further reduced its costs. In addition, the transparency of running on AWS helps the bank identify more opportunities for savings and allocate the costs to the teams using the corresponding AWS services.”
- 1) elastic, global scale application infrastructure.
- 2) faster developer rates of productivity.
- 3) Cloud cost efficiency.
This means scalability and developer performance have been greatly improved while simultaneously the costs required to achieve this are reduced and optimized.
Harness: Integrating Cloud Cost Management into DevOps
Harness is a vendor able to offer this multi-level transformation, uniquely a DevOps platform that also includes capabilities for Cloud Cost Management.
Writing on Linkedin CEO Jyoti Bansal how he believes this focus on developer efficiency will become the number one trend and objective for enterprise organizations, describing how one major airline saved $120 million in annual spending just by boosting developer efficiency by 40%.
Their webinar “Tips to Reduce Your Cloud Costs” provides practical advice on minimizing cloud expenses without compromising on performance, covering practical strategies to analyze your current cloud spending, optimize your usage, and choose the right strategy.
